Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.
Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.
I don’t own a cat, but this is basically the face I made while reading these tales!
I was one of those bookish kids who loved English class and could find something enjoyable, or at least relatable, about almost every piece of literature we were assigned. I’d even read as many sections of our textbook that weren’t assigned as I could because I loved discovering new authors, poems, and stories.
These are the handful of exceptions to that rule. I still dislike these books and authors to this day…although your mileage may vary!
1. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
This bored me due to the slow pacing as well as a setting (a boarding school for wealthy and often terribly emotionally neglected children) that I couldn’t relate to in any way despite honestly trying my best. My family was warm and loving but generally tight on funds for anything other than the basic necessities in life, so the idea of being sent away to an expensive boarding school and not seeing my parents for 9+ months of the year was just as unthinkable as sending one’s child to the moon. Honestly, reading about a moon colony would have been more relatable to me than this!
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I hated everything about this book: the glorification of wealth, the selfish, vain characters who valued money and social status over anything else, the bizarre indifference Daisy and her husband whose name I can’t remember felt towards their own child, the way the wealthy characters threw lavish parties and wasted money while the poor people in their communities suffered terribly, and more.
As an adult, I realize that at least some of these passages were meant to be criticisms of the pursuit of wealth and power above all else, and it might come across to me differently if I’d read it when I was older than 16. But being exposed to it at that age, and after growing up in a family whose values were the opposite of the ones these characters held, disgusted me and I have never felt the urge to reread it or check out more of Fitzgerald’s work in general.
3. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Technically, this was a long poem from the 1700s we were assigned to read in one of my university courses, but I think it’s close enough to count. It was about an old sailor who kills a harmless albatross that helped their ship escape from an ice jam. I was furious with this sailor for not only killing an animal he wasn’t planning to eat but also for killing one that had just helped him. It was a senseless and cruel decision. Honestly, I rooted for the antagonists for the rest of this poem instead of for the sailor. That’s how mad I was at him.
I am grateful for all of the Top Ten Tuesday participants who blog about nonfiction and enjoy talking about it. One of my quiet hopes for the future for this blog hop is that we’ll get even more nonfiction readers to join in on the fun.
Title: 
My answers are going to be for older books this week, and I’m trying to pick titles that I have not discussed in previous WWBC or Top Ten Tuesday posts as well. (Or at least haven’t discussed very much).
I’ve been participating in Top Ten Tuesday for years now, but I’m still a little confused by the concept of a beach read. Being at the beach is no different than being in a library, coffee shop, waiting room, train car, or at home when it comes to what I read.
Title: 
I generally do not binge-watch shows due to my spouse’s preference for programs that involve war, pandemics, alternate history (and not the cheerful sort that imagines a better world), various sorts of apocalypses, fascist governments, etc.
I have a couple of relatives who were adopted as a sibling group after living in an orphanage in the 1940s or 1950s, but it would be quite rare for that to happen these days as most children in the foster system are now either being looked after through kinship care or traditional foster care.
Title: Child of the Sea
I’ve done a lot of quote posts for various blog hops over the years, so I’m going to make it a little more challenging for myself this week by narrowing it down to quotes about summer.